Tag: Postcolonialism

2017 marked the 25th anniversary of Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of Modern Law. An eloquent and incisive critique of Occidental law’s pretensions to secular origins, Fitzpatrick’s text remains of prime significance to scholars engaged with the constitutive forces of race, racism, and colonialism in the structure and political, philosophical and psychoanalytic imaginaries of modern law.…

Alvina Hoffmann Interviews Walter Mignolo.1 This interview first appeared in E-International Relations. Where do you see the most exciting debates happening in the field of cultural theory? In general, the most interesting are the varieties of creative thinking and doing (publications, exhibits, artists, organizations, web networks) coming from the non-European regions of the planet…

Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions, edited by Sandeep Bakshi, Suhraiya Jivraj, and Silvia Posocco has just been published by Counterpress to much acclaim. CLT are pleased to republish the foreword by Walter Mignolo. Decolonial Body-Geo-Politics At Large Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all…

The Jungle is not just a camp for the undocumented, it is also a social body and above all a political subject; the way it has evolved gives us insights into how the political problems that produced it can be resolved. On the 26th of September 2016 the President of the Republic François Hollande visits…

English version of interview with Brenna Bhandar* by Olivier Chassaing, translated by Chayma Drira for Période, the French online journal of Marxist theory, available here. Olivier Chassaing (‘OC’): By studying law, one can explore how capitalist societies rest upon and strengthen different social hierarchies: class, gender, race dominations, as well as persisting colonial structures and…

The zones of sub-humanity are regions of non-being, where if you are not truly human you cannot claim to be treated as human, that is to say, to be a subject with human rights. Some people are just too small to be human, and maybe that has always been the case. But ever since Western…

Key ConceptPaul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, which was first published in 1993, remains remarkable for its introduction of the validity of ‘race’ as an analytical category in presenting the ‘Atlantic’ as a discrete geo-political unit in the modern capitalist world-system.1 The book elaborates a richly provocative critique of cultural nationalism, against which Gilroy posits black…

The founding act of xenophobic politics is the drawing of a boundary line between those who have to be protected and those who can—or rather, must—be excluded from protection. Last week the British government’s Border Agency (UKBA) pushed its new and controversial “go home” campaign into full effect along with an accompanying, and highly criticized…

What the middle-​classes of Europe are waking up to is some­thing that co­lo­nial peoples have known for a long time In a recent brief exchange between Oscar Guardiola Rivera and Walter Mignolo, responding to an impossibly broad question about Europe’s current crisis, Guardiola Rivera quipped that Europe was colonising itself. Just think, he said, of…

A transmodern world has emerged, reconfiguring the past 500 years of coloniality and its aftermath, modernity, postmodernity and altermodernity. A remarkable feature of this transformation is the creativity in/from the Non-Western world and its political consequences—independent thoughts and decolonial freedoms in all spheres of life. Decoloniality of knowledge and being, two concepts that have been…

At a recent workshop organised by the Westminster International Law and Theory Centre, Doreen Massey and David Harvey both spoke about space, spatiality, and politics. While there are many significant differences in the intellectual projects of these two sages of critical geography, they also agreed about many things. Thinking spatially offers us a way of…